A Pragmatic Study Of The Discourse Marker Well In The Vampire Diaries

In linguistics,a discourse marker is a word or phrase that is relatively syntax-independent and does not change the truth conditional meaning of the sentence,for example,well,oh,now,then and you know etc.It seems that these discourse markers themselves don't have lexical meanings.But they can show the connection between what is being said and the wider context,between a sentence and what comes before or after,and between the speaker and hearer.Thus,discourse markers have much significance in language use.In the previous studies,there have appeared many different theories explicating discourse markers,such as the syntactic-pragmatic theory,the coherence theory,the relevance theory and the adaption theory etc.However,in fact,none of these approaches can perfectly illustrate the use of discourse markers(or DMs for short).And as yet scholars have not reached any consensus as to its name,definition,classification and functions.In daily communication,well has high frequency of occurrence.Based on the previous studies and theories,the present study takes the Vampire Diaries(first season)as the corpus,and investigates the pragmatic functions of well in it.The Vampire Diaries is an American television drama,which debuted on CW Television Network in September 2009.The series became popular as soon as it debuted.The TV series have a great many short words with discourse functions and the discourse marker well occurred frequently in the TV series.Through collecting and analyzing dialogues which contain discourse marker well,this paper finds that the pragmatic functions of well in the Vampire Diaries are mainly embodied in two aspects: cognition and coherence.The present study will,therefore,apply the relevance theory and the coherence theory respectively to analyze the pragmatic functions of well in detail.The research on discourse markers based on the relevance theory framework mainly focuses on the cognitive motivation of employing discourse markers,but fails to exhibit pragmatic functions of discourse markers from the perspective of discourse coherence.And the research based on the coherence theory does that.The application of the two theories is to help people better understand the meaning of well in the Vampire Diaries.Also,the employment of these two theories in this paper aims to demonstrate that it's difficult to exhibit all the pragmatic functions only within one framework and it's better to expound the role of discourse markers within two or more frameworks which have different emphasis and which complement with each other.Besides,it's both theoretically and practically significant to do research on discourse markers.Hopefully,this thesis can also contribute to the learning and acquisition of discourse markers and help English learners better express their meaning by using discourse markers appropriately.